A revenge fantasy about your boss. Your to-do list. That flop of a meeting. You need to quit ruminating about your job. Here’s how to do it.
4 min
It’s one thing to work long hours. It’s another to surrender your free time to swirling thoughts of office predicaments and projects hanging over your head.
Many of us can’t let work go. It’s sinking our mental health and damaging our relationships. We need to shift the approach in our heads.
Joe Mellin thought maybe a week alone in the woods would do it. He journeyed by plane, bus and minivan to a remote pocket of Colorado for a program that coordinates solo wilderness excursions. Armed with a toothbrush, a journal and some dried split peas, the 41-year-old hunkered down to meditate and find out who he was.
Turned out, he was someone who really liked obsessing about his job.
“I was literally saying, Joe, you’re in Colorado, you’re off work, you’re in the middle of a forest, stop thinking about work,” the Washington-based tech worker recalls. By hour 36, in the quiet of his sleeping bag under the moon, he gave in. Soon he was sketching PowerPoint presentations in his journal, filling 20 pages with notes before he was finally able to let go.
Whether you’re on a spiritual quest in Colorado or at the playground with your kids, internally troubleshooting next week’s client pitch or entertaining revenge fantasies about a colleague, there’s a cost.
“You’re getting aggravated anew each time,” says Guy Winch, a psychologist and author who fashioned a TED Talk on the subject.
We often think we have to fix our jobs to relieve our work stress. “You might,” he says. “But fix you first.”
Start by tracking how much time you’re spending ruminating about work, Winch says. For many of his patients, that’s 10 to 20 hours a week—after-hours. (At the office, we’re generally too busy doing the job to perseverate about it, he says.)
To stop the cycle, tax your mental capacity with something more complex than Netflix or a walk. Try a memory task like naming all 50 state capitals or recalling the items in your fridge, Winch suggests. Two to three minutes is often enough for a reset.
Then, channel what you had been obsessing about into something useful. Ask yourself: What’s the actual problem to be solved? If you’re worried about workload, can you delegate to teammates or decline meetings?
If there’s nothing to be done about the situation—some co-workers are just annoying—try to find the silver lining, Winch adds. Maybe this is the spark you finally need to find a new, better job. Maybe you’re building skills that will help you in the future.
We’re bombarded with emails, Slack messages and back-to-back Zoom calls during the day, so it’s no wonder we can’t turn off our brains when we shut the laptop. We mentally brace for pings of all kinds, even when they’re not coming.
And some of this is on us. So many employees have tied their identities to their jobs.
“They’ve defined their whole value this way, so it makes it that much harder to let go of things,” Rebecca Zucker, an executive coach, observes of some of her clients. “Something that goes badly at work can feel annihilating.”
Lauren Orcutt, a 36-year-old in Sacramento, Calif., loves being a copywriter. Some of her friends and family don’t love constantly hearing about it, she says.
“I think about it so much, it just comes out,” she explains.
She’s often up at 3 a.m., galvanised by an idea for a new blog post or needled by the realisation she messed up an email. “I kind of felt like I was working all night” for months, she says. Her sleep suffered.
To reclaim her brain space, Orcutt started jotting down her thoughts in a lavender notebook she now keeps on the nightstand. Mistakes that are plaguing her get their own page, which she rips out in the morning.
“I am going to throw it away and move on with my life,” she says. Even capturing the good ideas calms her, helping her drift back to sleep.
Ruminating about work can make it hard to fall and stay asleep, and damage our mood and mental health, says Verena C. Haun, a professor at the Julius Maximilian University in Würzburg, Germany, who studies psychological detachment from work. Depleted, we often perform worse at work the next day.
She suggests marking the transition from work with a simple ritual, like washing out your coffee cup or changing clothes. Find a hobby, or three, that make you truly forget about work while you’re doing them. Set a goal, say, an hour spent gardening, especially on stressful work days.
You can’t think about work when you’re trying not to crash a boat, Jackie Hermes, the chief executive of a marketing firm, says she discovered. When the onset of the pandemic caused her business’s revenue to drop 40%, she rethought her relationship, once all-consuming, with her job.
“Is this really what I’m dedicating my entire life to?” she asked herself.
She doesn’t work less hours now, but she has changed how she thinks about work, allowing herself more flexibility and trying new things in her personal life. During the day, she’ll sometimes pop into the boating club she recently joined or catch a Milwaukee Brewers game at the ballpark.
“Work isn’t the only priority anymore,” she says, noting that so much about our jobs is out of our control anyway.
Now she tells herself, “I’m not behind. It’s always going to get done.”
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Investors are bracing for a bumpier fall stock market due to shifting odds of a Federal Reserve interest-rate increase and other macro challenges.
3 min
The stock market had a decent summer. Investors are bracing for a bumpier fall.
In the past couple of months, equity investors cheered soaring profits at big companies, shrugged off jitters in the bond market and nudged megacap tech shares back near records.
Now, as the post-Labor Day stretch begins, a number of new challenges lie ahead: ever-shifting odds of an interest-rate increase from the Federal Reserve. Sky-high expectations after a stunning earnings season. The persistent threat of higher consumer prices as fighting in the Middle East drags on.
“You’re moving from this earnings-driven market to this macro-driven market with the Fed, inflation and interest rates in focus,” said Keith Lerner, chief investment adviser for Truist Advisory Services. “It tends to be a choppier period.”
Historically, every major U.S. stock index experiences its worst average return in September. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has slid an average 1.1% in the ninth month of the year, in data that dates back to the 19th century. The S&P 500 has seen the same average decline—and for every September dating back to 1928, the benchmark ends the month lower more than half of the time.
Analysts caution against reading too much into those seasonal patterns. But in recent weeks, new reasons for investor caution have emerged. One of the largest: the looming threat of an interest-rate increase from the Fed, which announces its next policy decision on Sept. 16.
Chairman Kevin Warsh’s decision to ditch forward guidance and take more of his cues from markets has muddied the waters for investors when it comes to monetary policy. That has left traders scouring Fed governor speeches and economic-data reports for clues on the central bank’s next move.
“There’s going to be a lot of eyes on those numbers,” said John Luke Tyner, head of fixed income and portfolio manager at Aptus Capital Advisors.
The past couple of weeks offered just one example of how frequently those expectations can change. After Warsh struck a hawkish tone during remarks on Aug. 28, the odds of a hike at the Fed’s next meeting jumped from 35% before the speech to 58%, according to CME FedWatch data.
On Thursday, Fed governor Christopher Waller made a case for leaving rates where they are. Interest-rate futures showed coin-flip odds between a hike and a hold. Then Friday’s robust jobs report amped up rate-hike bets once more, back to a roughly 60% chance of higher rates after the meeting.
“Rates have really been driving the car for equities the last few weeks,” said Ross Mayfield, an investment strategist at Baird.
That uncertainty comes as an unruly bond market could put pressure on stocks. Treasury yields have marched higher for much of the summer, driven by concerns about rising oil prices, growing U.S. budget deficits and a deluge of tech-company bonds now competing for investors’ cash. Last week, the rout went global, pushing yields to multiyear highs in Japan, Germany and the U.K.
Higher bond yields can drag on stock prices and lift borrowing costs for companies and consumers across the economy.
Rising prices remain the top concern for bond traders, and continued fighting between the U.S. and Iran has done little to ease those worries. The national average price of diesel climbed to a record of $5.850 on Friday, according to AAA. That is up from $3.712 a year ago.
Investors will get more insight on the path of prices this week, with the much-awaited consumer-price index report due Friday and a reading on producer prices Thursday.
With another blockbuster earnings season in the books, some analysts have also warned that any boost from the third-quarter reports due in the coming months could be minimal. Back-to-back quarters of standout profits have raised expectations and made it especially difficult to impress traders. Custom-chip company Broadcom, for example, said Wednesday that it more than tripled its earnings and nearly doubled its revenue. Shares slipped 2.7% the next session.
Many analysts note there are plenty of reasons not to panic. The economy is in impressive shape, thanks to a healthy labor market and the rippling effects of the artificial-intelligence investment boom. Profits are booming at America’s biggest companies. The Cboe Volatility Index has dropped to its lowest levels of 2026. Credit spreads are tight, a sign bond investors aren’t concerned about economic conditions that could hurt companies.
But the mood has shifted from the euphoria that felt tangible when the Nasdaq was notching back-to-back records early this summer. The question, Mayfield said, is whether the fundamentals that have bolstered the bull market so far can stretch the rally into 2027.
“There are more anxieties or uncertainties about the backdrop,” he said. “It does feel like a transitional moment.”
